Interviews

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Creator Interview

We get the dirt on the next chapter in the Star Wars saga straight from the top!

Interviewing Haden Blackman and Matt Omernick, the Project Lead and Art Director of LucasArts' upcoming The Force Unleashed, it was tough not to get a little wowed. Between the two of them, they've helped shape some of the best Star Wars gaming moments; Haden has worked on virtually every LucasArts Star Wars title in the last nine years, and Omernick has worked on Battlefront and Battlefront 2, Mercenaries, RTX Red Rock and Secret Weapons Over Normandy. Thankfully we managed to keep it together when we met with them at a lone table during the 30th anniversary party at Star Wars Celebration IV.

GameSpy: Of all the Star Wars games you've both worked on, which was your favorite?

Blackman:The Force Unleased, without a doubt! (laughter) I worked on KOTOR a little bit, especially during the first year of development, I love KOTOR and KOTOR's a great game, both the Starfighters I'm pretty fond of, we had some great characters in those games. But really, The Force Unleashed is doing stuff we've never done in a Star Wars games in terms of really creating the next chapter of the Star Wars saga and creating a set of characters and gameplay around that that really pushes boundaries.

GameSpy:
In our first look at The Force Unleashed a few months ago, LucasArts mentioned that the previs and concept art really pushed the design forward. Would it have been been possible to pitch the game another way, or was it necessary to have art to show where you wanted to go, and some proof that the technology you wanted was feasible?

Blackman:
For me, I think we had to go that route. With the previs in particular, because getting buy off on the concept of The Force Unleashed was kind of threefold. We needed the team to rally around it and understand that when I say The Force Unleashed, the game is about kicking someone's ass with the Force, they need to have a mental image of what that is, right? So, it was good for that.

The second layer was that we wanted to get everybody on the exec staff at LucasArts on board, but then the third layer is George Lucas himself. Here we're gonna try to reimagine and reinvent the Force, use it in whole new ways. We needed something really short and punchy and powerful that he could look at and say "Yeah, that's gonna make a great game." George really does understand gameplay and he understands that we have different needs than a film or a comic book or a cartoon. And as soon as he saw that previs he said "Yeah, go make that game."

Now, the second part of your question was "Did that prove out the technology?" Well, it absolutely didn't, because at that point it was just a previs. And for us, and we tell this story all the time, we went and we showed it to George and George said "That's great, go make that game." And...I was terrified presenting that to George, and then after he said "go make that game" I was even more terrified. Because we don't even know how we're going to make that game yet.

Since then we've invested in technologies like Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, we built our own renderer and our own engine in-house, we're using the Havoc physics system, but it wasn't until we did a first prototype mid- to late last year that we really could look at that and say yeah, we now have the technology to do what we showed in the previs. The concept art started before that and continues even to this day, and continues to help sell the project on all those levels.

GameSpy:
The concept art has really pushed the idea that The Force Unleashed lets you do things you haven't ever done in a Star Wars game, such as the image of a Stormtrooper smashing through beams from a Force push.

Omernick:
Exactly. That's one of the earliest pieces, too, that we all started to rally around. You know, LucasArts has a real legacy of being extremely visual and relying heavily on concept art. I say this a lot, but I think I have the best concept artists in the industry on my team. So, we invest a lot early on in that work, and the amount of work that we created is unbelievable. But it did drive all that previs, it was building up to that. Okay, now we've got these static images of what we think Force Unleashed is, what's that next step? That's where the previs came from. We rely heavily on concept art.